The 5 Steps to Follow to Create Content That Converts
If you’re a content creator or have at some point created a form of content to help highlight your expertise or perhaps showcase a product or offering, you already know how disappointing it can get when you spend hours working and don’t see the type of response you were hoping for. You may get a few people to absorb your content and only a handful may share it but none of them go on to take the call to action.
So what exactly happened that caused that?
Although the depth of the content you created may have been strong, there is a strong chance that you didn’t create it with conversions in mind. Ultimately, the goal here is to create content that converts. As a content creator if you focus on conversions as the end goal of each piece of content you create, there are a few things you’ll end up doing a bit differently throughout the process of creation in order to increase your overall effectiveness. We’re going to discuss a few examples of content pieces below!
One thing to point out first and foremost is that not every piece of content you create will play a direct role in the conversion process. For example, a Facebook post may include a powerful call-to-action (CTA) or it might just be a fun message that’s designed to get likes and nothing more. Finding the right balance of each is important. Think of it this way, if every piece of content you create is focused on conversions, you risk coming off as overly-promotional, something that many of your prospective customers may not appreciate.
[irp]
Another thing to keep in mind is that there is rarely a direct connection between any individual content piece and an eventual conversion. Depending on your marketing funnel, prospective customers may read different pages on your website, perhaps view video clips, encounter display ads on other sites and maybe even talk to a sales representative.
Despite all of the complex sales paths and things to consider, you can still take some actionable steps to improve the effectiveness of your content. When you read through the following steps, keep the distinctions in mind and focus on applying this process to your big-ticket content pieces (ie. Landing pages, About pages, Pricing pages). Once the pages are optimized, you can always go back and apply these principles to the remaining content on your website.
Enough context, lets jump into the steps:
Identify Your Target Audience by Creating Buyer Personas
To help identify your target audience, you need to create buyer personas. A buyer persona, for those of you who didn’t already know, is basically a fictitious representation of your target customer. These can be as detailed as you like but ideally you want to visualize the type of person you’re writing for. When thinking about buyer personas, you may want to answer questions such as the following:
- What is my buyer persona’s job title?
- What challenges does my buyer persona face at work?
- What information will my buyer persona find useful?
Keep in mind that many companies tend to have 2-3 primary buyer personas that they work with, although yours may have more or less depending on the circumstances involved.
Identify Where Your Content Lies Within Your Marketing Funnel
Step one of the process is done, now you know who you’re targeting but you aren’t finished yet. In addition to creating various buyer personas, you also have to contend with different stages of the buying process. Below are some of the stages that may be applicable to the buying process of your prospective clients:
- The recognition of the problem and a need to resolve it
- The search for information on potential solutions to the problem
- The evaluation of alternative solutions and fixes
- The decision to make a purchase
- The evaluation of the solution post-purchase
You have to put the stages together with your buyer personas and once you do, you’ll have a combination of potential targets. Based on that, you may decide to create any of the following content pieces (not a full-list by any means):
- A blog post
- A video-based tutorial
- A series of case studies
- A traditional white paper conveying product or service details
You technically don’t have to come to craft every content piece you produce to one buyer persona and one stage in the buying process. One of the pieces listed above that’s intended to appeal to one target may be just as effective at moving another through the different buying stages and vice versa. That being said, it comes to crafting content for conversions, it’s useful to know who you’re targeting and what the most issues in their mind are. The better tailored your content is, the more likely you’ll be able to resonate with their needs and convert prospective customers to paying ones.
Set One Target Action for Each Piece of Content
Keep the following principle in mind: For every one piece of content, you should have one target action.
When you create content with the goal of improving your conversions, you must have something in the content that’s going to prompt people to take action. This mechanism for obvious reasons is dubbed a “call to action” and tells visitors exactly what you want them to do once they’ve finished with your piece of content. It should also tell them how to go about doing it.
Pretty simple, right? You may think so but a survey of 200 B2B small businesses conducted by Small Business Trends found that 70% of participating businesses lacked a call to action on their homepage. Talk about missing a huge opportunity…
So what exactly should you target with your calls to action? You can certainly encourage actions that represent conversions for your business such as downloading software, requesting a free trial or alternatively move a prospect closer to converting by liking the company Facebook page or opting-in to an email list to receive updates.
Some of the call to actions you can put into place include: downloading software, requesting a free trial, filling out a lead generation form, downloading a white paper, downloading a free eBook, downloading a coupon, viewing a video clip, sending an email, requesting an online demo, opting-in to an email newsletter, completing a survey, following a social media profile or leaving a comment.
Pick one of the call to action options, or come up with one of your own. If you incorporate multiple calls to action into a single page, you can confuse your readers. Think about it? Should your customer subscribe to your email newsletter first or should they go to your Facebook page? If they decide to go to your Facebook page first, what are the odds they’ll remember to come back and opt-in? You can minimize this confusion and focus on consumers completing your most important call to action by selecting a single option for each piece of content you push.
Utilize and Integrate Effective Calls to Action In The Content You Are Pushing
Once you’ve selected the type of call to action you’ll be including in your piece of content, your next step is to add it to your content. Will you include the call to action as a text prompt at the end of your page? Will you incorporate it as a graphical button? Or perhaps you’ll create a lightbox-style pop-up ad that’s displayed when readers reach a certain part of your page.
As you may have guessed, some calls to action will perform better than others. This is based on the wording, styling and location you place the call to action at. There’s no way you can predict with certainty which of the combinations will be most successful for you. The best way to make your calls to action as effective as possible is to consider the following suggestions for improving your requests:
- Test The Copy of Your Button – If you’re using a button, try using different text and design variations.
- Experiment with Various Colors – If your CTA involves color, try using different color combinations until you find one that reinforces the psychological appeal of the message you are pushing.
- Try Out Different Locations – Above-the-fold, on a sidebar, in the middle of the piece of content, at the end of the piece of content – which works best?
- Redesign your Call to Action – If you are using graphical elements, try a complete redesign. Maybe your CTA isn’t performing because your customers don’t find the CTA appealing.
- Delay Showing Your Call to Action – If you make people to wait to see your CTA, you increase the odds they’ll spend enough time on the page to learn what you do and what the benefits you might bring to them. Try delaying the CTA to improve performance. For those of you who have a high bounce rate or a product that is complex, you may definitely want to give this point a go.
- Get Creative – Mix things up and always be sure you are testing various calls to action. You won’t know what plans work best unless you try them.
- Try Using Reverse Psychology – Negative language can be surprisingly effective in your CTAs. Depending on your industry, it may work for you too.
- Try Using Special Effects (if possible) – Can you possibly use animation? Motion graphics? What about enforcing your readers to scroll through all of your content before viewing your entire call to action. The tweaks can make or break the difference between marginal performance or excellent performance.
- Try Delivering Your Call to Action On Exit – There are several tools that launch a pop-up CTA box whenever a user’s mouse heads towards the back button. Some users may find the technique being spammy or annoying but others may find it to be very effective.
We aren’t saying go out and try all of these techniques at once because if you do that, you may not know which change led to more conversions. Instead, pick one that you think is likely to make the biggest difference. See if the changes you make result in a higher rate of conversion, If not, give another strategy a try and see how that works instead.
Keep Track of Your Results
If you’re serious about getting the most conversions out of your content, you’ll have to test everything. So what exactly does everything consist of? It may be one of the following:
- The Type of Content – Test to see if you get more conversions when you create a video, if you send users to a landing page from PPC traffic, or perhaps it’s in the form of a blog post. See which content is performing best on your website as you’ll want to expand these opportunities by delivering more similar pieces.
- The Subject of the Content – Testing the number of completed conversions from each CTA will give you better insight as to how you’ll want to utilize your CTAs in the future.
- The Channel You Are Using to Promote Your Content – Which platform is converting better for you? Social media? PPC advertising? SEO? You’ll want to know so you can figure out how to best allocate your marketing resources.
No matter what you do, the one thing that remains constant is that you’ll want to test everything. Depending on your business, this might be something as simple as monitoring the number of Facebook likes your page has received or as complex as a multi-touch attribution model that measures conversions and assigns relative weight to each touch point that led up to it. Bringing all of the different elements together can be time-consuming. That being said, if you’re serious about improving your business’s online performance, crafting your content for conversions by following these steps is important.
So what’s stopping you? Try the steps out and let us know how it goes!
Shay Masand
I like to call myself the 'cool guy' in the office, even though all of my work is virtual. If internet marketing is the jam of business these days, I am the nutella.
If you’re a content creator or have at some point created a form of content to help highlight your expertise or perhaps showcase a product or offering, you already know how disappointing it can get when you spend hours working and don’t see the type of response you were hoping for. You may get a few people to absorb your content and only a handful may share it but none of them go on to take the call to action.
So what exactly happened that caused that?
Although the depth of the content you created may have been strong, there is a strong chance that you didn’t create it with conversions in mind. Ultimately, the goal here is to create content that converts. As a content creator if you focus on conversions as the end goal of each piece of content you create, there are a few things you’ll end up doing a bit differently throughout the process of creation in order to increase your overall effectiveness. We’re going to discuss a few examples of content pieces below!
One thing to point out first and foremost is that not every piece of content you create will play a direct role in the conversion process. For example, a Facebook post may include a powerful call-to-action (CTA) or it might just be a fun message that’s designed to get likes and nothing more. Finding the right balance of each is important. Think of it this way, if every piece of content you create is focused on conversions, you risk coming off as overly-promotional, something that many of your prospective customers may not appreciate.
[irp]
Another thing to keep in mind is that there is rarely a direct connection between any individual content piece and an eventual conversion. Depending on your marketing funnel, prospective customers may read different pages on your website, perhaps view video clips, encounter display ads on other sites and maybe even talk to a sales representative.
Despite all of the complex sales paths and things to consider, you can still take some actionable steps to improve the effectiveness of your content. When you read through the following steps, keep the distinctions in mind and focus on applying this process to your big-ticket content pieces (ie. Landing pages, About pages, Pricing pages). Once the pages are optimized, you can always go back and apply these principles to the remaining content on your website.
Enough context, lets jump into the steps:
Identify Your Target Audience by Creating Buyer Personas
To help identify your target audience, you need to create buyer personas. A buyer persona, for those of you who didn’t already know, is basically a fictitious representation of your target customer. These can be as detailed as you like but ideally you want to visualize the type of person you’re writing for. When thinking about buyer personas, you may want to answer questions such as the following:
- What is my buyer persona’s job title?
- What challenges does my buyer persona face at work?
- What information will my buyer persona find useful?
Keep in mind that many companies tend to have 2-3 primary buyer personas that they work with, although yours may have more or less depending on the circumstances involved.
Identify Where Your Content Lies Within Your Marketing Funnel
Step one of the process is done, now you know who you’re targeting but you aren’t finished yet. In addition to creating various buyer personas, you also have to contend with different stages of the buying process. Below are some of the stages that may be applicable to the buying process of your prospective clients:
- The recognition of the problem and a need to resolve it
- The search for information on potential solutions to the problem
- The evaluation of alternative solutions and fixes
- The decision to make a purchase
- The evaluation of the solution post-purchase
You have to put the stages together with your buyer personas and once you do, you’ll have a combination of potential targets. Based on that, you may decide to create any of the following content pieces (not a full-list by any means):
- A blog post
- A video-based tutorial
- A series of case studies
- A traditional white paper conveying product or service details
You technically don’t have to come to craft every content piece you produce to one buyer persona and one stage in the buying process. One of the pieces listed above that’s intended to appeal to one target may be just as effective at moving another through the different buying stages and vice versa. That being said, it comes to crafting content for conversions, it’s useful to know who you’re targeting and what the most issues in their mind are. The better tailored your content is, the more likely you’ll be able to resonate with their needs and convert prospective customers to paying ones.
Set One Target Action for Each Piece of Content
Keep the following principle in mind: For every one piece of content, you should have one target action.
When you create content with the goal of improving your conversions, you must have something in the content that’s going to prompt people to take action. This mechanism for obvious reasons is dubbed a “call to action” and tells visitors exactly what you want them to do once they’ve finished with your piece of content. It should also tell them how to go about doing it.
Pretty simple, right? You may think so but a survey of 200 B2B small businesses conducted by Small Business Trends found that 70% of participating businesses lacked a call to action on their homepage. Talk about missing a huge opportunity…
So what exactly should you target with your calls to action? You can certainly encourage actions that represent conversions for your business such as downloading software, requesting a free trial or alternatively move a prospect closer to converting by liking the company Facebook page or opting-in to an email list to receive updates.
Some of the call to actions you can put into place include: downloading software, requesting a free trial, filling out a lead generation form, downloading a white paper, downloading a free eBook, downloading a coupon, viewing a video clip, sending an email, requesting an online demo, opting-in to an email newsletter, completing a survey, following a social media profile or leaving a comment.
Pick one of the call to action options, or come up with one of your own. If you incorporate multiple calls to action into a single page, you can confuse your readers. Think about it? Should your customer subscribe to your email newsletter first or should they go to your Facebook page? If they decide to go to your Facebook page first, what are the odds they’ll remember to come back and opt-in? You can minimize this confusion and focus on consumers completing your most important call to action by selecting a single option for each piece of content you push.
Utilize and Integrate Effective Calls to Action In The Content You Are Pushing
Once you’ve selected the type of call to action you’ll be including in your piece of content, your next step is to add it to your content. Will you include the call to action as a text prompt at the end of your page? Will you incorporate it as a graphical button? Or perhaps you’ll create a lightbox-style pop-up ad that’s displayed when readers reach a certain part of your page.
As you may have guessed, some calls to action will perform better than others. This is based on the wording, styling and location you place the call to action at. There’s no way you can predict with certainty which of the combinations will be most successful for you. The best way to make your calls to action as effective as possible is to consider the following suggestions for improving your requests:
- Test The Copy of Your Button – If you’re using a button, try using different text and design variations.
- Experiment with Various Colors – If your CTA involves color, try using different color combinations until you find one that reinforces the psychological appeal of the message you are pushing.
- Try Out Different Locations – Above-the-fold, on a sidebar, in the middle of the piece of content, at the end of the piece of content – which works best?
- Redesign your Call to Action – If you are using graphical elements, try a complete redesign. Maybe your CTA isn’t performing because your customers don’t find the CTA appealing.
- Delay Showing Your Call to Action – If you make people to wait to see your CTA, you increase the odds they’ll spend enough time on the page to learn what you do and what the benefits you might bring to them. Try delaying the CTA to improve performance. For those of you who have a high bounce rate or a product that is complex, you may definitely want to give this point a go.
- Get Creative – Mix things up and always be sure you are testing various calls to action. You won’t know what plans work best unless you try them.
- Try Using Reverse Psychology – Negative language can be surprisingly effective in your CTAs. Depending on your industry, it may work for you too.
- Try Using Special Effects (if possible) – Can you possibly use animation? Motion graphics? What about enforcing your readers to scroll through all of your content before viewing your entire call to action. The tweaks can make or break the difference between marginal performance or excellent performance.
- Try Delivering Your Call to Action On Exit – There are several tools that launch a pop-up CTA box whenever a user’s mouse heads towards the back button. Some users may find the technique being spammy or annoying but others may find it to be very effective.
We aren’t saying go out and try all of these techniques at once because if you do that, you may not know which change led to more conversions. Instead, pick one that you think is likely to make the biggest difference. See if the changes you make result in a higher rate of conversion, If not, give another strategy a try and see how that works instead.
Keep Track of Your Results
If you’re serious about getting the most conversions out of your content, you’ll have to test everything. So what exactly does everything consist of? It may be one of the following:
- The Type of Content – Test to see if you get more conversions when you create a video, if you send users to a landing page from PPC traffic, or perhaps it’s in the form of a blog post. See which content is performing best on your website as you’ll want to expand these opportunities by delivering more similar pieces.
- The Subject of the Content – Testing the number of completed conversions from each CTA will give you better insight as to how you’ll want to utilize your CTAs in the future.
- The Channel You Are Using to Promote Your Content – Which platform is converting better for you? Social media? PPC advertising? SEO? You’ll want to know so you can figure out how to best allocate your marketing resources.
No matter what you do, the one thing that remains constant is that you’ll want to test everything. Depending on your business, this might be something as simple as monitoring the number of Facebook likes your page has received or as complex as a multi-touch attribution model that measures conversions and assigns relative weight to each touch point that led up to it. Bringing all of the different elements together can be time-consuming. That being said, if you’re serious about improving your business’s online performance, crafting your content for conversions by following these steps is important.
So what’s stopping you? Try the steps out and let us know how it goes!
